Bronx cheer?

[aegypt]

One of the most treasured possessions of my childhood was a Japanese-made whoopee cushion that bore a cartoon of a farting man and the legend:

“Surprise your friends with the sound of a real Bronx Cheer!”

An incident parallelling the one Proust described at the beginning of À la recherche du temps perdu happened to bring back this childhood memory recently.

Now I wonder what Bronx could possibly have to do with raspberries? My dictionary doesn’t offer a theory, and I haven’t been able to find anything on the Internet.

[AndyJ]

http://www.bartleby.com/62/83/B0198300.html

Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition. 1995.

Bronx cheer

NOUN: Slang. Any of various derisive sounds of disapproval: boo, catcall, hiss, hoot. Slang : bird, raspberry, razz. See SOUNDS

[AndyJ]

Even better info from here.

http://home.att.net/~nyctravel/bronx2.html

Where did the Bronx Cheer Come From?

Bronx County Historian, Lloyd Ultan says the Bronx Cheer got its name "around the turn of the century in a vaudeville house in the Hub section of the Bronx. One act was so bad, the audience jeered it with a sound like ‘pffffft.’

The next day, in a review, a newspaper writer called it a Bronx cheer."

[DVous_Means]

At the risk of being labelled lazy for not checking the archives, what is the origin of the term “Bronx cheer”?

[DVous_Means]

A simulpost!

Someone must have read my mind…

[aegypt]

Thanks for the info! Tough audience, these Bronxers.

By the way, “raspberry” may be Cockney rhyming slang for “raspberry tart” (“fart”).

[Pop]

Hmm. That just sounds too easy. One bad review and the Bronx gets stuck with phhht for a cheer?

Can anyone find anything more definate than the opinion of a Bronx historian?
(no offense, Andyj. I appreciate your work, it just seems like too innocuous an explantion to get world-wide circulation, like it has)

[aegypt]

Hmmm. A trip to the local library turned up a 1948 book called “A Hog on Ice and other curious expression”, by Charles Earle Funk. He has this to say:

This somewhat disgusting sound expressing contemptuous disapproval, the reverse of a cheer–a vibrating sound partly uttered through loosely closed lips and partly through the nose–seemingly owes its present name to the unusual skill displayed by the residents of the northern geographical section of New York City, or to spectators at athletic sports events [3] held in that borough, in loudly producing this vocal effect. Before, roughly, a dozen years ago [4], the same sound was called “the raspberry,” usually written “razzberry”; to “get the raspberry” or “to give one the raspberry” was in slang use as early as the 1890s and is still regarded as a more refined expression than “Bronx cheer,” if refinement may be considered in this connection. “Raspberry” was and is frequently shortened to “the berries.” [5] The British equivalent is “to get, or to give (one) the bird,” [6] a usage that traces back to theatrical slang of the middle nineteenth century.

So I suppose it may have something to do with sporting events as well, but Funk seems pretty vague and doesn’t cite any sources. Does anybody have access to a good book on slang phrases?

By the way, while we’re discussing the subject, what is the best way to “spell” a Bronx cheer?

A Don Martin strip from an old issue of Mad that I dug up has it as “Pbbllbbllbbllppptt”. Pretty good, though hard to spell.

Al Capp used to spell it “Bftsplk”. Also not bad.

[Pop]

Thanks aegypt.
Sporting events may have carried the usage further, considering that they Yankees are in the Bronx and visiting teams would have been the target of the cheer, so that makes a bit more sense…

On the other hand, the author equate “giving the bird” with giving a raspberry and, unless I’m mistaken, “giving the bird” is a well known hand signal (two fingers in Britian, only one in the US). The two fingers used in Britian can evoke the image of a bird’s tail feathers.

[aegypt]

*Originally posted by Pop *
**Thanks aegypt.
Sporting events may have carried the usage further, considering that they Yankees are in the Bronx and visiting teams would have been the target of the cheer, so that makes a bit more sense…

On the other hand, the author equate “giving the bird” with giving a raspberry and, unless I’m mistaken, “giving the bird” is a well known hand signal (two fingers in Britian, only one in the US). The two fingers used in Britian can evoke the image of a bird’s tail feathers. **

That’s what I thought too, Pop. However, it seems that “to give the bird” used to mean something else earlier. Funk gives the following explanation:

Actors get the bird when the performance is so bad that the audience rebels, by hissing and booing, or, in more recent years, by executing the Bronx cheer. The expression was the forerunner of getting the raspberry. It dates from about the middle of the nineteenth century, being first recorded in Hotten’s Dictionary of Modern Slang in 1859. But, in turn, this expression was preceeded by its logical forerunner, “to get the goose,” in allusion to the hissing of the goose, a theatrical phrase that goes back at least to the beginning of the nineteenth century.

[samclem]

Lighter, the last word(usually) on American Slang, can only cite it from 1927. If someone can cite it earlier, I’d be surprised. Not to say it didn’t originate earlier, but show me the cite.